Game of Thrones: The Impaler of the Blue Fork

Chapter 41: The Barb and the Flail in the Slime

The rain was so heavy it felt like it was about to collapse the sky.

The dull sound of footsteps crushed the wind and rain.

Fifty-four routed soldiers. They wore Blackwood's black robes with raven patterns, and some wore Blaken's red robes, ripped to shreds by a knife. The two sides had lost their flags over a few dozen miles at the Red Fork River, and now, for the sake of hunger, they had forgotten their old grudges and become a pack of wild dogs searching for food.

Hunger filled their eyes with a yellowish turbidity as they stared intently at the dry wells behind the log doors, each with a roof and possibly filled with rye.

The wooden door was open.

There was no way out. In the inner fortress, there were only thirty-six men left who could still breathe and stand upright.

Toren wiped the cold rain from his face and gripped the ash wood pole stuck in the mud. A new gash on his left shoulder had turned white from being soaked in the rain; there was no medicine to apply, so he could only forcibly strangle the flesh with a hemp rope.

The twenty peasant militiamen beside him were making a horrifying clattering sound as their upper and lower jaws clattered together. They were standing in a muddy pit full of pebbles and puddles, their toes frozen blue and stiff. In their hands, they held strange wooden poles, each three feet long tightly wrapped in black cloth, the cloth already soaked through and heavy with rainwater.

Otto stood five paces behind the square formation.

The heavy gray linen cloak, soaked with autumn rain, hung like an iron armor on his shoulders. He didn't move his right hand to press the sword, letting the cold rain wash away the warmth from his pale cheeks.

"They're here." The veteran's low growl was cut off by thunder.

The routed soldiers roared like a black and red mudslide as they crashed into the wooden raft passage outside the gate.

The passage was originally flanked by three-foot-deep trenches, deliberately dug to disrupt the enemy's formation. However, heavy rains and mudslides washed away and soaked the rotten wooden planks and thin layer of mud covering the trenches. The entire passage was transformed into a single, shallow, muddy swamp.

The fleeing soldier at the forefront trampled through his camouflage. Yellow mud seeped up to his thighs, and the cold mud seeped into his iron boots. He tripped over the muddy ground.

The fleeing soldiers at the rear couldn't stop and crashed heavily into the back armor of their comrades. Seven or eight vanguard soldiers, like dead flesh thrown into dough, cursed angrily in the mud and desperately tried to pull themselves out.

The formation was distorted and slowed down.

"Step over them! Chop up these farmers!" Several defeated soldiers carrying heavy flails simply used the shoulders of their fallen comrades in front of them to step on their dented back armor and leap into the air.

The flail, covered in rust and spikes, slammed down with a howling sound like a storm against the shield wall blocking the road.

"Thump—click."

A corps commander's oak shield, along with its outer iron sheath, was dented and broken by the flail. The immense recoil snapped the veteran's left radius bone. The broken bone pierced the flesh, steaming blood seeping through the cold rain.

The veteran let out an inhuman howl of pain as he was smashed to his knees in the mud.

The shield array tore open a wide gap.

A broadsword slid along the slit, slicing open the unprotected thigh of another farmer. Warm, black blood mingled with the muddy water.

The defensive line was on the verge of collapse on the third breath after contact. The thin formation of thirty-six men was being utterly exhausted by dozens of desperate, routed regular soldiers.

"Labu."

Otto's Adam's apple bobbed as he uttered two words.

Standing on the far left, Toren spat out bits of chewed-up stick from between his teeth and suddenly blew his sharp bone whistle. The long whistle pierced through the rain.

The twenty farmers in the back row, who had been struggling to hold on, suddenly loosened the knot in their left hands. The heavy, wet black cloth wrapped around the three-foot-long spearhead slipped and fell into the mud.

Beneath the black cloth lay a spear that could not penetrate chainmail.

Instead, it was an inverted crescent-shaped hook that shimmered with a mixture of azure and dark light under the pale rain.

Before the fleeing soldiers could even get a good look at the strange iron object, they were caught off guard.

"Retreat, sink!"

There was no stabbing motion.

Urged on by the whistle, the farmers abandoned their thrusting. In unison, they extended their ash wood poles five feet forward, and using the extension of the long poles, their sickles flew over the top edge of the heavy wooden shields of the fleeing soldiers in the front row.

Then, they pushed off the mud with their feet and, using the weight of their entire bodies, fell backward.

"Sizzle—hiss!"

The iron hooks gripped tightly onto the iron rings under the fleeing soldiers' robes or the leather throat guards under their helmets.

The combined weight of dozens of adult farmers as they sat back exploded. The foundation of the heavily armored rout soldiers, which they had been so proud of, was forcibly destroyed in an instant by this brute force.

Five or six tall, fleeing soldiers in the front row collapsed forward like boneless shovels. Their heavy visors slammed into the mud, and mud seeped into their tracheas through the vents.

For a heavily armored soldier who has fallen into the mud, getting up is harder than climbing to heaven.

"prick!"

The bone whistle sounded again. Without hesitation, the veterans in the front row, shields raised, plunged their short swords mercilessly into the gaps in the back armor and helmets on the ground. Blood bubbles rose and gurgled in the puddles.

However, this tactic is not perfect.

"I can't draw my spear!"

A farmer screamed in terror. He had used too much force, and the barb in his hand had become firmly stuck at the junction of a fleeing soldier's shoulder blade and chainmail. The fleeing soldier convulsed and rolled in the mud, generating a tremendous twisting force that, instead of dislodging the iron hook, caused the ash wood pole to swing violently.

The rough splinter scratched the farmer's palm. Just half a breath later, as he tried to loosen the wooden handle...

"Kill him!"

One of the bandits, leaping up from the back of his comrade's back armor, ignored the man who had been stabbed to death at his feet. He wielded a chipped battle axe and, with the force of a downward slash, cleaved the farmer's left shoulder and neck in two.

Blood gushed into the rain. The farmer's entire left side was smashed open, and he fell into the ditch, still convulsing.

One mistake can cause the entire line to collapse.

The sluggishness of the barbs caused several farmers in the back row to lose their weapons. The bandits, like hungry wolves, seized the moment when the defense line faltered. Four or five desperados, armed with short swords and flails, squeezed through the gap into the inner side of the shield wall.

In just two exchanges, the three militiamen had their abdomens ripped open by short swords. Their large intestines, along with stomach acid, slid down to their ankles, and the bandits, like slaughtering pigs, continued to squeeze their internal organs inward.

The veterans in the front row were attacked from both sides, and their formation visibly crumbled from the center outwards.

The farmers' eyes were filled with fear.

A three-foot-long iron sword with a broken tip flew out of his hand.

With a violent spinning force, it slammed into the eye socket of a fleeing soldier who was about to smash the flail into the back of a recruit's head with a muffled "thud".

The fleeing soldier fell backward, his grayish-white brain fluid mixed with the cold rain flowing into the muddy water.

Otto stepped through the blood that was up to his ankles and took three steps from behind to cross the gap in the defense.

His left shoulder was unaffected; he gripped only the broad, thick short sword he had retrieved from the pile of corpses with his right hand. The gray linen cloak had been discarded in the mud.

There were no rousing battle cries, no empty words about "for the sake of the oath." In the mud ditch, it was a struggle for breath.

A heavily armored deserter, with a physique like a bear, gripped his battle axe in reverse and brought it down on the head of the young man who had suddenly appeared. The axe blade sliced ​​through the cold rain, carrying with it a bone-chilling wind.

Otto did not block. He used the footwork he had learned from Braavos, following the sloping terrain of the mud, his body tilting strangely like a broken axle.

The battle axe narrowly missed cutting through the fabric of his hempen robe by half an inch, then plunged deep into the mud.

Before the burly man could withdraw his two-handed axe, Otto, with his right-hand short sword close to the ground, aimed straight up at the artery on the inside of the man's thigh, which was not covered by his armor.

A muffled "slice" sound, like a sharp blade slicing through ligaments.

That iron leg, thicker than Otto's thigh, sprayed blood mist several feet high. The burly man screamed and knelt down. Otto didn't stop; using the momentum of his rise, he brutally slammed his mud-covered left knee into the man's recoiled face. The sound of facial bones shattering could be clearly heard in the chaotic battlefield.

But he is not an indestructible god.

As he drew his short sword, a wooden stick with its chain broken struck him in the lower back from the side. The immense impact sent Otto tumbling into a pile of corpses.

"My lord!" Pollifer screamed desperately from behind, clutching a wooden board used for accounting, trying to run but unable to move his legs.

Two fleeing soldiers, wielding short, rough knives, rushed forward through the mud, intending to slit open the leader's head for a reward.

The farmers, who had been terrified after Otto filled the gap, were finally awakened by the stimulation of the blood.

They saw their lord, younger than themselves and usually so ruthless in distributing rations and salt, now covered in blood and mud, fighting tooth and nail with those old, ruthless soldiers in a mud pit. Four or five farmers, instead of wielding their spears, dropped their cumbersome wooden poles and grabbed scattered stones and rusty broken swords. Like mad dogs, they pounced on the fleeing soldiers surrounding Otto.

There were absolutely no rules; it was all instinctive biting. They used their teeth to gnaw at the throats of the fleeing soldiers and their fingernails to gouge out their unprotected eyes.

In this ditch, two groups of starving people, driven mad by different motives, devoured each other. The front line, on the verge of collapse, was forcibly forged back together.

Fifteen minutes later.

The fighting stopped. The wind and rain continued to pour.

On the fan-shaped slope outside the gate lay the remains of thirty-seven routed soldiers, some with severed legs and others missing heads. In the ditch and pit, a dozen or so corpses lay piled together, their bodies floating in the foul-smelling, acidic water from punctured stomachs. The remaining dozen or so old and disabled soldiers had thrown down their weapons and, dragging their terrified, broken bodies, fled south along the river and into the depths of the heavy rain.

On the inner fortress side, nine men were dead, and seven were seriously wounded, unable to even stand. The ground was littered with coarse hemp and filthy flesh torn apart by barbs. The remaining thirty-six men had suffered further losses.

Cole, carrying a short axe with half its handguard charred, walked over to the survivors digging through the muddy puddles, their armor half-cold. He smashed a stone into the back of the head of an enemy soldier who was feigning death. The skull shattered into pieces.

Otto sat on a wooden stake covered in mud.

His left hand gripped the thick cloth on his thigh tightly, the cold sweat from his forehead washed away by the rain. He refused Pollifer's attempt to help him up, and continued to breathe slowly and steadily with his back hunched over.

He looked at the blood and mud all over the ground.

"Duke Horst sent me from the riverbank to find a knight in charge who has broken the rules and caused a huge mess."

In the pouring rain, a deep, strange voice with a metallic resonance suddenly came from the edge of the muddy slope fifty paces away. The sound wasn't loud, but it was as clear as a knife scraping against a whetstone in the downpour.

There were no banners, no shouts.

Four figures riding on tall chestnut horses appeared before the dilapidated official road.

The leader was wearing a long, wide, dark gray, rainproof leather cloak. He wasn't wearing a helmet or hat, and rainwater streamed down his messy, grayish-white, coarse short hair onto his cold, hard face, which resembled a jagged rock.

His sharp, eagle-like eyes pierced through the gray-white rain, fixed on Oto, who was lying on the ground covered in mud and bits of flesh, panting heavily as he sat on a wooden stake.

"I had expected to find a group of tenant farmers, terrified and begging for help, scattered across this desolate wasteland."

Under the old man's cloak, where the saddle was partially exposed, hung a broadsword made of pure steel, without any gemstone decorations.

"This is truly a surprise to the old man. I must have been blind. This muddy mess doesn't give way to a tenant farmer's shack."

He turned the horse's head so that its hooves landed precisely on the edge of the ditch that had been soaked with mud from the living people.

Brynden Tully, "Blackfish," is the Duke of the Riverlands' brother and Westeros's most difficult veteran to fool.

"This place is a living, breathing stone mill that sucks the marrow of defeated soldiers and feeds them raw flesh."